Acronis True Image 2014 Premium review

True Image 2014 is the latest version of Acronis’s home backup software. It’s long been one of our favourites, with the last five iterations all receiving top marks from our reviewers, but today it faces more competition than ever from cloud-based alternatives. Acronis has responded by embedding its own cloud service in the last few versions, but with True Image 2014 it’s possible, for the first time, to back up and restore an entire system from the cloud, storage space permitting.

This year we’re reviewing the Premium edition of the software, which includes a few features not found in the standard version. These are mostly geared toward administrative tasks such as restoring and migrating an installation to new hardware, but there’s also support for Windows’ dynamic disks. While these are rarely used by system builders, you may have them if you’ve chosen to create a striped or spanned disk set from within Windows Disk Management instead of using your motherboard’s RAID feature. It’s worth checking within Disk Management if you’re in any doubt.

All versions of True Image 2014 come with 5GB of Acronis’s own cloud storage for a year, which is only enough to offer an additional safeguard for critical documents or a modest music or photo collection. You can upgrade this to 50GB for £25 per year or to 250GB for £40 per year. At the time of writing Acronis is bundling a one-year 250GB subscription with the standard edition of True Image for an extra £10. A one-year 250GB subscription is included for free with the Premium edition, which is good value if you plan to use cloud backups extensively.

PLUS CA CHANGE

Our first impression of True Image 2014 was one of familiarity. Very little has changed in the user interface since True Image 2013, which is a good thing. The product opens with a Get Started screen that provides quick routes to back up or recover data, plus simple graphical introductions to the key features, but the full functionality is gathered into tabs spanning Backup and recovery, Synchronisation, and Tools and utilities.

The getting started screen is uncluttered and helpful for novices

You can create a backup containing selected files and folders, or use disk mode to back up an entire disk or the partitions on it. While previous versions of True Image allowed you to back up files and folders to the cloud, True Image 2014 also lets you back up disks and partitions to it. It’s good that cloud storage is integrated in this way, but for the vast majority of users the first full backup, containing all of the computer’s data, is likely to take a long time. A 250GB upload could take more than 20 days on a good ADSL2+ connection capable of 1Mbit/s upstream, provided it doesn’t exceed your broadband account’s data cap. Unfortunately, the program queues backup jobs instead of tackling them in parallel, so a slow cloud backup could hold up any subsequent local jobs.

You can backup and restore an entire PC to the cloud, but it’ll be slow over a typical home broadband connection

Cloud restore operations are likely to be far quicker thanks to faster download speeds, but we found that recovery from the cloud isn’t handled as neatly as the backup itself. Restoring from an online archive opens True Image’s interface in a browser; you then need to log in and download a zip archive of the data you want.

Things are more impressive from within True Image’s recovery environment, which provides a bootable recovery manager in the event that you can’t get into Windows. You’ll need to create the necessary boot disk from the Tools and utilities tab. It’s possible to restore the entire PC from a cloud backup just as you would from a local disk. We tested the performance by backing up two PCs to the cloud. We then reformatted and restored them. The initial backups on both PCs failed; subsequent backups worked. We also had a failed restore on one of the PCs initially, but it worked after that. The other PC restored first time.

Create a rescue disc or bootable USB drive, as you’ll be glad of the bootable recovery environment if a disk fails and you need to restore it to a new one

SYNCING FEELING
One of the advantages of cloud storage is that it’s accessible anywhere you have internet access, making it perfect for synchronising data between multiple computers or people. As with True Image 2013, True Image 2014 lets you specify one or more folders on your PC to synchronise with other computers running True Image (you can buy a three-licence bundle of the Premium edition for £70 and the standard edition for £60). As you might expect, there are also free Android and iOS apps that let you access your sync folders from smartphones and tablets. It’s easy to synchronise folders among more than one PC. Better still, the synchronised folder doesn’t have to be stored at the same place on your hard drive, so you can the same folder, syncedfolder, stored at C:samplefoldersyncedfolder on one PC and D:syncedfolder on another.

Use Acronis’s cloud storage to share and synchronise folders between multiple people

True Image’s remaining features are gathered together in the Tools and utilities tab, which in the Premium edition contains additional options for converting backup types between Acronis and Windows formats. This is a useful feature if you have an existing backup you need to access. There’s also a mounting tool, which lets you access the contents of a disk image as though it were physically installed in the system. The remaining tools are identical between the standard and Premium editions, and include useful utilities for drive and file destruction, disk cloning and for large disk management.

True Image has a comprehensive set of tools, though image mounting and backup conversion are unique to the Premium edition

While little seems to have changed in True Image 2014, over the past year we’ve noticed that True Image 2013 was a step up in reliability from earlier versions of the software. We’ve obviously spent less time with 2014, but it seems equally stable and responsive, even when we left a backup running and used various other features.

While we remain to be convinced about large cloud backups over home broadband connections, it’s just one option in an excellent, comprehensive product. True Image 2014 remains the best software for home and small business users who want to safeguard their data.